INTERVIEW
The judicial liquidation of the France-Antilles group was declared on Thursday January 30 by the commercial court of Fort-de-France, in Martinique. Three French departments, Guadeloupe, Martinique and Guyana therefore find themselves without a local daily newspaper. 235 employees are unemployed and still in shock. "It was brutal even if we have seen the difficulties for months. But nobody believed it, it was impossible", explains Caroline Bablin, the editor-in-chief France-Antilles Guadeloupe , at the microphone of Europe 1 Wednesday.
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"There has been constant erosion of readers for ten years"
If this decision is not a surprise - the group was in receivership since June 25, 2019 and experienced losses of 500,000 euros per month - the journalists thought that we would eventually find a solution. "We were several to accuse the blow after the decision of the commercial court. We thought that something was going to be found!" confides Emmanuel Poupard, first secretary general of the National Union of Journalists (SNJ) in Culture Médias.
The group was bought two years ago, and even if big investments were made, mainly on two presses, one for Martinique and one for Guadeloupe, "it turned out to be very complicated. It was a descent little by little ", says Caroline Bablin. "There has been constant erosion of readers for ten years," she adds. And even if the state had injected three million into the group, 1.3 million euros were still missing. "I saw Franck Riester, the Minister of Culture, last week and I asked him why the State could not add more. And the answer is that it was not possible to add more than one for one since otherwise the European Union was tapping on France's fingers ", explains Emmanuel Poupard.
"Information is not a commodity"
Not only is paper daily disappearing, but so is its digital version. "There will be nothing at all, everything stops when we were the first news site in the Antilles-Guyana", laments Caroline Bablin, who also fears that the digital archives of the newspaper will disappear once the hosting of the site will end. A situation that inspires "a lot of disgust" in Emmanuel Poupard who recalls that "information is not a commodity". "It must be free and pluralist and we cannot be satisfied with the disappearance of a newspaper," he adds.
A last edition of the daily, printed at 55,000 copies against 20,000 usually, appeared Saturday in Martinique and Guadeloupe to pay tribute to the 55 years of life of the newspaper, and to say goodbye to readers. The number is on sale until Wednesday in order to financially support the 235 employees who find themselves unemployed. Their future remains unclear even if a new daily project is being studied.